The Mothers (20 page)

He would have to stop doing this, wondering about the life they might have had together, the family they might have been. He would have to be grateful for everything she gave him.

—

B
ABY REACHES F
OR
Daddy's unshaven face. Baby loves Daddy's rough skin. Baby bounces in the window when Daddy pulls into the driveway. Baby throws a rattle, a pacifier, a ball. Baby's got a hell of a throwing arm, Daddy's friends say, but Daddy secretly hopes Baby
has good catching hands. Baby swings at T-ball, Baby chases across soccer fields, Baby lines up for orange slices and water after basketball practice. Baby listens to Granddaddy preach. Baby watches football in Daddy's lap. Baby asks Daddy about his leg, Baby learns about the fragility of dreams. Baby straps on pads and learns pain. Baby stops crying when he is hit. Baby tosses the football in the front yard with Daddy, who always catches the ball perfectly. Baby can't understand why he still drops, but Daddy tells him his hands are too hard.

You need soft hands, Daddy says. You touch a girl the same way you catch a football. Soft hands.

—

W
EEKS AFTER HER
VISIT
to Dr. Toby, Aubrey made an appointment with a fertility specialist. She'd first read about Dr. Yavari on FertilityFriends.com, the forum where she'd been lurking for the past few months. On evenings when Luke worked late, she ate her dinner in front of her computer screen, slowly scrolling past the giant banner at the top of the lavender website that read,
There is no such thing as trying too hard to get pregnant.
She never told anyone about the website, not even Luke. She didn't want him to think that she was baby crazed and desperate. But there was something comforting about reading the message boards, about knowing that other women were struggling worse than her. They were, after all, the ones with screen names like MommytoBe75 or Waiting2Xpect82, the ones reporting their last menstrual periods or charting their days past ovulation to strangers on the Internet. She pitied these women, except for the ones who were trying for a second or third child. We all just want one, she always thought, angrily clicking out the website. On the forums, a rambling thread about California fertility
specialists mentioned Dr. Yavari, based out of La Jolla, whom former patients referred to as “the baby-maker.” The nickname comforted and disturbed Aubrey. She didn't want to think of her baby as created by a doctor, like some science experiment, but she appreciated the confidence everyone seemed to have in Dr. Yavari. Maybe this was what she needed, to visit an expert. Maybe Dr. Yavari could save her from becoming one of those sad women on the message boards. She called Dr. Yavari's office and when Luke said he couldn't miss work, she called Nadia and asked her to come with her.

“I can't,” Nadia said.

“Why not?”

“Because,” she stammered. “It sounds personal. Why don't you bring Mo?”

“She's working too. And who cares if it's personal? You're not exactly a stranger.”

She laughed a little, but Nadia was silent. A quiet distance had grown between them since Nadia returned. They still talked occasionally, but not as often as Aubrey had hoped they might. She tried not to take the unanswered phone calls and ignored texts personally. Nadia had her father to worry about, and the last thing she needed was Aubrey burdening her with her own hurt feelings. Still, she felt that distance widening the longer Nadia went without answering.

“Please,” Aubrey said. “I just get nervous. And it'd make me feel better if you were there.”

“I'm sorry,” Nadia finally said. “I'm being dumb. Of course I'll come with you.”

The next afternoon, they drove to Dr. Yavari's office, a tan building with palm trees sprouting in front. In the waiting room, framed photos of mothers cradling babies hung over the receptionist's desk like a
promise, but Aubrey felt like the images were teasing, dangling right in front of her the things that she wanted. Beside her, Nadia played with her phone and Aubrey tried to flip through a
National Geographic,
but ended up twisting it in her hands into a glossy tube.

“Why are you nervous?” Nadia asked.

“Because. I know something's wrong with me.”

She tensed, waiting for Nadia to ask how she knew. Instead, she felt Nadia's fingers stroke the back of her neck.

“There's nothing wrong with you,” she said quietly, and for a second, Aubrey believed her.

Dr. Yavari was Iranian, olive-skinned with dark eyes, and thirtysomething, much younger than Aubrey had expected her to be. She welcomed both of them into her office with a smile, sweeping her arm toward a chair in the corner. “Your sister can sit there,” she said, and neither corrected her. Strangers often mistook them for sisters or cousins or even, Aubrey assumed, girlfriends. She was amazed by their ability to resemble each other, to become family, to occupy, at once, different ways to love each other. Who were they to each other? Anything at all. While the doctor flipped through her charts, she sat on the metal table, her legs swinging off the edge. In the corner, Nadia leaned against a counter covered in tubs of purple plastic gloves while Dr. Yavari asked Aubrey a series of questions. How often does your period occur? Is it heavy, light? Any sexually transmitted infections? Have you ever been pregnant? Have you ever had an abortion?

“What?” Aubrey said.

“I have to ask,” Dr. Yavari said, drumming her pen against her clipboard. “I usually try to wait until the men are gone—you know, it happened in college, she never told her husband, et cetera.”

“No,” she said. “None.” But she appreciated Dr. Yavari's
compassion. She hoped the doctor didn't just guess that Aubrey was the type of woman who might have hidden a secret like that from her husband. She would have, but she hated the idea of the doctor knowing this about her.

After the exam, Dr. Yavari scheduled her follow-up appointment. Next time, there would be an X-ray to determine whether her fallopian tubes were open, a pelvic ultrasound to test the thickness of her uterine lining and check for cysts in her ovaries, and blood tests to measure her hormone production. When the doctor left, Aubrey dressed, pulling on her clothes that Nadia had folded in a small pile.

“I can't believe she asked you that,” Nadia said.

“Asked me what?”

“You know. The abortion thing. Why does it even matter?”

“I don't know. It must, if she asked about it.”

“Still. I can't believe it follows you around like that.”

Later, Aubrey would wonder what had exactly tipped her off. The statement itself, or the unusual softness in Nadia's voice, or even the way her face had looked under the fluorescent light, slightly stricken with grief. In the moment between when Nadia handed her her cardigan and she accepted it, she knew that Nadia was The Girl. Since Luke had confessed to her years ago, she had often thought about this nameless, faceless girl who had gotten rid of his child. A girl he'd loved but who had vanished, like the baby, both gone forever.

On the drive home, traffic in front of them slowed. She gripped the steering wheel tighter as the car inched forward. Beside her, Nadia fiddled with the radio dials until she reached an old Kanye West song they both used to love, one they'd listened to endlessly in her room and danced to together at Cody Richardson's party. She thought about that night, how sloppy drunk she'd been, how easily
she'd forgotten everything she didn't want to remember. She could have been anyone that night, in that skintight dress, dancing at a crowded house party with Nadia Turner. Toward the end of the night, Nadia had looped an arm around her waist and said, in her ear, “Let's get you home,” and she had nodded, realizing that she hadn't even thought about how she would get home. She had known, somehow, that Nadia would take care of her. In bed that night, before falling asleep, she'd felt Nadia's hand touch her back. It was a fleeting gesture—casual, like picking lint off someone's sweater—but in that moment, Aubrey had never felt so safe.

After she dropped Nadia off, she stopped at the liquor store around the corner. The tiny Indian man behind the counter waved at her as she walked in. The store was mostly empty, a washed-out blonde hauling a six-pack of Coors to the counter, two boys fighting over a bag of Hot Cheetos. She grabbed an Italian pinot noir because she liked the shiny silver label. At home, she drank half the bottle while she dressed, the other half after she'd already slipped into one of the frilly black teddies crumpled in the corner of her drawer. She shook out the wrinkles, then stood in front of the mirror, fighting with the straps and bows. After the wine, she wouldn't be able to unhook it herself. She imagined herself stuck in the teddy forever—would someone have to cut it off her, the way her father-in-law had sawed off Luke's purity ring?

She finished her wine on the couch, listening to the dull thud of the clock. By the time Luke came home, she was drunk and sleepy. She'd meant to answer the door in the teddy—she wanted to be the first thing he saw—but she was too slow and by the time he stepped inside, she was still splayed on the couch. He froze in front of her, still holding his keys.

“Are you okay?” he said.

She stood too quickly and lost her balance, grabbing the armrest to steady herself.

“Come here,” she said.

“Are you drunk?”

She grabbed the teal drawstring on his scrubs and tugged him closer. She reached inside his pants and felt him staring at her in a way he never had before, pitying her desperation. When he pushed himself inside, she clenched her eyes and found sweetness in the pain.

—

T
HE
NEXT DAY
, Luke asked Nadia if he could take her on a date. His face, inches from hers on her pillow, looked shy; she'd forgotten how curly his eyelashes were. The afternoon sun filtered in through the blinds and she felt lazy, warm and stretching against her sheets.

“Maybe downtown?” he said. “Or the harbor? I don't know. Wherever you wanna go.”

She traced his tattoos, the maze of interlocking images that covered his left arm. When she'd last undressed him, seven years ago, he'd had a few tattoos but now his full sleeve fascinated her: tribal markings stretched over his shoulder, and near his elbow, a skull gritted its teeth; a fanged demon's tongue transformed into flames that licked up around Luke's wrist. A cross on his biceps, and above it, the words
On my own.
A lion's head covered Luke's left pectoral, the mane flowing away like smoke. The other half of his chest was smooth, bare, his right arm untouched. His ink stopped abruptly, like he'd slipped one arm into a sweater and forgotten about the other.

“Why?” she said.

“Why what?”

“Why a date?”

He pressed her hand against his heart and rolled onto his side. She'd always heard that men hated to cuddle and it surprised her that Luke liked to be on the inside, cuddled by her. She had almost laughed the first time at the idea, but it made sense in a way, that everyone would want to be held. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed his muscled back.

“I don't know,” he said. “I just want to take you somewhere nice.”

“What if someone sees us?” she said.

“Let them,” he said. “I don't care.”

“You're married.”

“What if I wasn't?”

For a moment, she allowed herself to imagine it, how simple he made it seem, like a gate stood between him and freedom and all he needed to do was slip a finger under the latch. Luke was good at this, always finding an escape. She remembered watching him on the football field, amazed by how his body seemed to know, down to the second, when to juke left or right, always aware of the direction danger appeared. He'd escaped her once before; she couldn't help him do the same to Aubrey. Aubrey sitting on that metal table inside the fertility doctor's office, how small she'd looked next to the size of her wanting.

“You can't,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because she loves you,” she said. “We're just fucking around, but she loves you.”

“It's not just fucking,” he said. “Don't say that—”

“It is to me,” she said.

He silently dressed but paused halfway, his pants hanging at his ankles. He looked like he might cry, and she turned away. He didn't
love her. He felt guilty. He'd abandoned her once and now he was latching onto her, not out of affection but out of shame. She refused to let him bury his guilt in her. She would not be a burying place for any man again.

Luke forgot his watch on her nightstand, so the next morning, she brought it to Upper Room. When she pulled into the parking lot, Mother Betty was shuffling across the street from the bus stop. The DMV had taken her license after she failed her last driving test.

“They got me on those questions,” she said. “Who knows the answers to all those little questions anyway? I been driving sixty-six years and never hit nobody but these people gonna say I can't drive because of their little questions?”

She watched Mother Betty slowly sift through her ring of keys to unlock the front door, her hand shaking. It wasn't right, a woman her age waiting for the bus before daybreak.

“I can give you a ride,” Nadia said. She fumbled through her purse for a piece of paper. “I'll give you my number and you just call me when you're ready to go to work. Okay?”

“Oh no, honey, I couldn't trouble you.”

“It's no trouble at all. Really. Please.”

She held out the scrap of notebook paper. Mother Betty hesitated, then accepted it.

“You got a caring spirit,” she said. “I can sense it in you. Just like your mama.”

Nadia left Luke's watch on Mother Betty's desk. She drove home, glancing at her reflection in the rearview mirror. She touched the image but did not see her mother's face, only smudged
glass.